The Republican Party is running out of time
The Republicans must make the voting restriction moves now. The looming demographic of majority non-white voters is coming up within 10 years, maybe less. The Republicans are losing power at a critical time – before their wishlist was complete.
Georgia, Arizona and Texas were red states that are now purple, at best, and maybe they will be blue in the next few years. The GOP has been dominating in those states for years.
The GOP has been holding in those states for years because of older, non-college-educated and non-urban White voters. But white collar voters with a higher education level, and suburban/urban voters are about to overwhelm those voters.
Children of color now compose a clear majority of the under 18 population in Arizona, Texas, Georgia and Florida, and nearly half in the Carolinas, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. In Texas alone, local experts estimate that about 200,000 citizen Latinos will turn 18 and eligible to vote each year through at least 2028. Those states were the highest population in the Sun Belt.
Access to vote, restrictions on dates and reasons for requesting a mail-in ballot, proof of signature and identification, difficulty in registering people to vote in the right county by a deadline, dates that ballots are required to be returned, fewer early election dates for in-person voting are all some of the recent restrictions that Republicans are trying to enact on the state level.
The Republicans are in a race against time and they cannot win. They will be overwhelmed by their diverse population in a few years. Even if they succeed in passing a few laws, those laws could be rescinded as their states’ population changes. It is unlikely that the younger generations will vote against themselves as they reach voting age.
